TV review

Mulaney

Airs Sunday at 9:30 p.m. on Fox.

John Mulaney’s standup has always been firmly in the Seinfeld tradition: artfully worded, not too dirty, observational humor. (He does some pretty funny material about this very publication.) Like Jerry, he’s one of the best in the business — a real natural.

So it’s understandable he’d want his sitcom, “Mulaney,” to be an unabashed homage to “Seinfeld.” But that doesn’t mean it succeeds.

The bad news: The first episode is a mess. The good news: It gets (somewhat) better.

The series’ premise makes no pretense of trying to break new ground: shot with a live studio audience, it revolves around a New York comedian (Mulaney) and his two roommates, Jane (Nasim Pedrad, who was on “Saturday Night Live” while Mulaney was a writer there) and Motif (comic Seaton Smith, clearly modeled as the show’s Kramer).

Filling the Newman role is Andre (Zack Pearlman), a dorky pot dealer who regularly pops in; across the hall is a bohemian gay neighbor (Elliott Gould) who seems to exist merely to fill that slot in the sitcom template.

In the premiere, John gets hired as a writer for a legendary-comedian-turned-game-show-host (Martin Short), who turns out to be a narcissistic nightmare. The episode is stitched together, Frankenstein-like, from bits of Mulaney’s standup, and is painfully awkward; the only parts I laughed at were the actual standup that bookends the show (one “Seinfeld” hat tip of many) and when Short’s character delusionally announces, “I am 45 years old.”

But the second episode actually begins to find its footing, as John riffs on how he learned to talk to women from Ross on “Friends,” and Jane clashes with the comedy groupie John’s dating. In the third, Short’s character, Lou, becomes obsessed with a movie Martin Scorsese’s making about a serial killer, and Short — whose purported funniness has eluded me for many years — really lets go with a hilarious “audition” for the director while hosting his game show. It’s deeply weird, and it works, and it buoys the entire atmosphere of the show.

If “Mulaney” can regularly work gonzo moments like this into its overly-familiar setup, it just might have a chance. If not, well, it’ll just be a stepping stone for Mulaney’s next entertainment venture. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.